Chronic City

CHAPTER Sixteen

The ruinous night had more to give. Richard and Georgina led us in retreat to a wine bar up Second Avenue, a place for grown-ups (and therefore, to me, usually invisible) called Pangaea. It was as if we were intent on dishonoring the occasion, as if one bottle of wine could drive the scent of catastrophe and sorrow, the ozone singe of an acetylene torch cutting in twisted rebar, from our nostrils. Yet after a perfunctory glass of Barbera the other couple quit the place, and it was then that Oona and I tumbled into a grotesque conflict. Like a member of an ensemble still working from an earlier draft of the appointed script, I’d clung to my fancy idea about the mayor’s party, and I now produced that creamy invitation from my pocket, slid it across the candlelit table between us.

“I’ve got one of those,” Oona said.

“You do?”

“Funny, isn’t it?”

“I was hoping we’d go together.” I winced at hearing myself reproduce the tones of some minor courtier, or possibly those of Ralph Bellamy in a movie belonging to Cary Grant. Oona’s hunched and hunted posture suggested she felt uncomfortably public with me here, and that, in turn, seemed relevant to my dim proposal. Our skulking, I’d notice, was for Oona a highly local matter: West Side or Inwood okay, the East Side distinctly not. The mayor’s address was on Fifth Avenue. I’d pleased myself thinking she meant to spare me bad publicity, rather than avoid embarrassment with her friends. I could be wrong.

“I’ll be bringing Laird Noteless,” she told me. The unspoken insinuation I couldn’t keep from hearing was that she’d be sorry to see me there at all. The name she’d spoken revived an image of that shrine she kept over her desk, glowering Noteless and his portentous potholes, and threatened to give fly to every fearful accusation I’d kept partitioned for weeks simply out of gratitude that Oona would see me.

But I began coolly enough. “That reminds me, something happened downtown, I never had a chance to mention it with all this stuff. I don’t know if you heard, a man killed himself by jumping into Noteless’s memorial pit. As a result I never got to go on Brian Lehrer.”

Everything I mentioned annoyed her. “That happens from time to time. It’s just one of those stories they like to make a big deal over. You know how many suicides there are in this city?”

“You mean… more than one person has thrown themselves into his memorial?”

“The memorial, and other things he built. If you build bridges people throw themselves off those, too.”

“I’m surprised there’s such a big hole downtown,” I said. “I was under the impression Noteless just got that commission.”

“You’re mistaken. Excavation started down there a long time ago.”

Sure, sure, I was always mistaken. To be so was my great role, my Lear. Only I was less Learian than Othelloish at the moment. What was rising in me wouldn’t be so curtly swept aside whatever the mistaken facts surrounding excavations, fog, or suicide. I felt the sort of jealousy that wants to ruin all the things it doesn’t understand, because they suddenly made a picture of conspiracy. “This isn’t your usual piece of ghostwriting, is it?” I spoke as if I knew a remarkable amount about her regular work. At the moment I couldn’t recall the name of her raped power forward or defrosted Everest climber, but I fished up the one name that offered itself. “What is it about Noteless that’s so different from, say, Emil Junrow?”

“One important difference I can think of is that Emil Junrow has gone to meet his maker, whom he incidentally always referred to as the Flying Spaghetti Monster.”

“Does Noteless chase you around the desk like Junrow?”

“Oh, no, Noteless, strangely enough, employed handcuffs and chloroform.” Oona’s sarcasm was keyed precisely to the level of my righteousness, her tone ferocious enough to convey how little she cared to be questioned. We might ascend to a screaming match by this method, my accusations lucid while her chosen words remained all spaghetti monsters and other non sequiturs.

Seeing the trap, I was nonetheless doomed to the jealous interlocutor’s task: I needed to hear her deny something. “Why would you go as Noteless’s date? Is he some kind of extra boyfriend?”

“I’m not Laird’s plus-one, he’s mine. And here’s the funny thing: you don’t need an extra boyfriend when you don’t have one in the first place. Next time you spot our waitress, flag her down. I don’t like it here.”

The waitress had been keeping her eye on me, I’d happened to notice (that might be something Oona didn’t like about the place), so I extended my hands and made a scribbling motion on an invisible notepad. “Why am I not your boyfriend?” I said. I knew it was abject, but there’s something about me, I like to think, that can carry off an abject line.

“That’s too easy: because I’m not your girlfriend.” She rolled her eyes at the ceiling, meaning outer space.

We’d reached another accustomed juncture: Oona pouring cold water on my romancing by means of a disconcerting allegiance to my fiancée. The waitress slipped a bill under the candlelight, and not wishing for Oona to pay, I slapped down a pair of twenties as if to trump it. One of many trumps I now intended to make. I wouldn’t think about Janice, or Noteless, instead turn my disadvantages, the whole night’s wretchedness, into adamancy, and opportunity. “Fair enough, but I’m your something,” I said slyly, quoting Oona to herself.

“For now we’ll leave it at that.”

“Let’s say I wanted to change the world all around.”

“Make day night, black white, that sort of thing?” She spoke distractedly, fidgeting into her coat.

“Why don’t we go back to your place?” I said. Oona only looked at me, but her crooked smile, lip caught on her teeth, might have admitted for the first time that I’d once appeared in that apartment. She let me guide her to the street again, to where it was cold and the only thing to do was to begin walking briskly somewhere. I couldn’t tell whether any of the people on the sidewalk were special visitors drawn to the neighborhood by the tiger’s attack. If so, they did nothing to give themselves away. We were two blocks north of it all. I didn’t think about Perkus, alone in his apartment. I meant to do some pair-bonding. Oona fell into step beside me, clearly on a bearing for my building, not so large a victory as I craved.

“Why can’t I visit there?” I pressed.

“It’s a workplace, not a fuck place, that’s all.” She liked to use this word often. “I didn’t get where I am today fucking in my workplace.”

“Do you have some other-‘fuck place’?”

“Yes. Your apartment.”

Though this qualified as a sort of happy thought, my cascading emotions glitched again. “Who’s the strange small man you eat sandwiches with?” The words spoke themselves, my desperation couched in a feeble air of impertinence.

“Is that a Zen koan? I eat sandwiches with a wide array of strange small men.”

“The one in your apartment that day-I mean, your workplace. Is he some kind of Noteless research assistant?” My brain was like a tongue exploring a cold sore.

“I call him He-Who-Is-No-Larger-Than-a-Breadbox. You have nineteen questions left.”

“He must have an actual name.”

“That’s true. If I tell it to you will you shut up?”

“Sure.” Now that it was too late I hoped this deal we’d struck could be convivial. I wanted to shut up, truly I did, and I’d be glad to think she knew it.

“His name is Stanley Toothbrush.”

“See, now you’re definitely making fun of me, because that’s idiotic.” It was as though she’d read my thoughts the afternoon I’d invaded her office: that the indistinct little door-opener might somehow be Oona’s equivalent to Perkus.

“Stanley would be awfully hurt if he heard you. You’ve no idea how often people laugh in his face.”

“Toothbrush… that’s just a little hard to swallow.”

“No more so than stuff you swallow every day.”

This puzzle given air, we entered my building and rode the elevator in silence. Who could pull off a credible jealous outburst in this incongruent atmosphere? So just through my doorway, into the dark of my rooms, I cornered and kissed her, leaving the lights off. Was I as hungry to have her in bed as I suddenly felt, or was I faking one agitation into another? Oona’s lips and hands were cold, and I was aware of the fragility of her little body in the winter. Her frame wasn’t strong enough to drag around a coat heavy enough to warm her. I pushed up her sweater and even her nipples seemed cool in my lips. We tripped over ourselves to my bed. I hadn’t had a significant amount of wine but it appeared we might be drunk on the tiger’s kill. The shades were raised so moonlight streamed in and outlined our limbs cinematically, an effect which doomed my brain to distracted ponderings at key moments. If Oona was a raven, then her armor of irony was all feathers, as delicate, as crucial. Nobody wanted to imagine a bird without feathers. She couldn’t be blamed, had shrouded herself in this life, in this world, the only way she knew how. So anything she inflicted on me was on the order of a helpless defense against this disarranging urgency I couldn’t possibly be alone in feeling. (I had a gasp or two from her now for proof.) We’d only been cast in roles, and I could forgive any witty tactics. I should go deeper into my part, not slacken for fear of being foolish. In this I drew on everything that was obvious about women and intellectuals as well as everything I knew in my art.

First I pushed Oona to one extra brink, after I had nothing left myself, used my mouth, everything I knew in that other art. Her orgasms shuddered through her to her eyelids, her skinny knees and elbows swimming together as though she fought upstream, a froglike convulsion, while she glanced at the nearest blank wall, her gaze trying to deny what the rest of her confessed. When at last we lay cooling and destroyed, heads twinned on pillows, I spoke, bearing in mind that actors were more at home in their emotions than many who might be smarter in other ways. The key would be to forge a language so direct, so irony-immune, that it cut off Oona’s typical avenues of escape. “I’m with you now,” I said. “There’s no one else. I don’t love anyone else.”

“You don’t know who you love.”

“You, you, you.”

“You’re confused. I’m a suitable secret, if you also have a glamorous dying astronaut. Without her, you’d see clearly that I’m a creep.”

Oona’s voice was small and steady in the dark. From this angle my window was half blocked by the Dorffl Tower, the bar of moonlight running across our naked bodies, to the curtain of shadow bisecting our stomachs. I’d have had to crane around to see my church spire. The birds were elsewhere at night. I figured they found shelter in another place, together or separately-tabulate this with the other mysteries.

“Why do you say she’s dying?”

“Isn’t that the story? My mistake, if not.”

“I hadn’t-” I couldn’t finish, my grandiose offering broken apart, shattered from underneath as a building might be wrecked by a burrowing tiger, by levels of despair opening within me. I mourned the passing of a restaurant; the premature death of an eager-to-party waitress named Lindsay, whose phone number in fact lay within reach, still bookmarking my bedside Wodehouse; the exile of Perkus Tooth from the pair-bonding I so yearned for on his behalf; the incommensurate, irreconcilable, unbereaved nature of all human relations, particularly the local sample now on display in my bed; I mourned too the collapse of my script, the skit of avowal I’d scripted while we fucked, and had vowed to enact afterward; I mourned it all except for Janice, who seemed remoter from me than ever. Perhaps the poisonous failure of my love had grown in her, and was now threatening to murder her, an abscess mimicking a tumor. In space you were meant to die by vacuum. I was the vacuum.

“I’m extremely tired of this conversation,” said Oona without mercy. Certainly she’d heard the shallows in my breathing as I strained not to weep. “If you love me, go on loving Janice. That’s what I need you to do.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Pretend.”

“I’m having a crisis of authenticity.”

“Well, I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

“What do you mean, you wouldn’t?”

“I just wouldn’t recommend that type of crisis for a person in your position. You’ve got little enough authenticity to spare, I wouldn’t use up any of your precious supply on a crisis.”

Before I knew it Oona was dressed. Some nights she stayed, others crept away, but she’d always before hovered in our afterglow at least a while. I’d driven her away. I scrambled to don pajama bottoms, looking to dignify the early exit, mask it as normal.

“Do I have any questions left?”

“Nineteen,” she said, rather tenderly now. “I keep my promises.”

“A few weeks ago, did you happen to notice either a sweet chocolate smell or a high ringing sound?”

“Neither,” she said. “I was busy working.”

“Okay,” I said. I padded after her as she retraced the path of our strewn clothing, finally to the still-dark entranceway where she reclaimed her coat and heels.

“Anything else?” she asked.

“Are you really going to the mayor’s with Noteless instead of me?”

“You have your own invitation. I’ll see you there. It’s just a dinner party.”

“Not a date.”

“Not a date.” Every word Oona gave me before slipping away was generosity, drops of water in the desert. “I don’t date old men. Not around Christmastime, anyway. Too depressing.” The light from the outside corridor fell in around her as she readied her escape, casting her in doorway silhouette. I crossed my arms over my naked white chest, feeling the typical humbleness of the shirtless and barefoot before the dressed. At that moment, out of that vulnerability, I understood my assignment. What Oona had asked of me was simple, only I’d refused to understand until now, believed her arcane or perverse. The answer was love. My job was not only to endure and thrive in the impossible situation but to make myself into a kind of chaldron, to generate a love field broad enough to enclose our fear. This was no time for parsimony. If my love was enough to reach Janice in orbit it would ipso facto cover Oona as well, and anyone else who needed to feel it, most particularly Perkus in his desolate rooms. I had nothing to protect or defend. I only had to do my job. This is what Oona wanted me to know, I was sure of it. I uncrossed my arms, stepped into the light so she could see the tender face that had just fitted itself between her thighs. All the talk since was like wind rattling the windows, outside of what mattered.

“You can bring someone, too, you know,” she said.

“I’ll bring Perkus,” I said. “He needs to get out more often.”

December 18